Bangladesh Bank’s official website is back online after a precautionary shutdown that lasted roughly two-and-a-half days. The central bank restored access at 8:00 am on Sunday, October 25, 2026, following a global cybersecurity alert.
The site was taken offline on Thursday, October 22, after the European Union’s cybersecurity agency warned of two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a widely used programming language. Security firms discovered the flaws using AI tools, and although patches were released, the details became public before they could be fully applied. The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to remotely execute commands on servers without passwords, posing a risk to sensitive data.
Bangladesh Bank spokesperson Arif Hossain Khan confirmed that the shutdown was a purely preventive measure, and that the bank’s connection with commercial banks remained unaffected during the outage. The decision to keep the site offline until Sunday was made to align with the resumption of banking operations after a five-day holiday.
This is not the first time the central bank has faced cyber threats. In 2016, hackers diverted $101 million from its account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. More recently, in 2023, the bank shut down some internal web-based services for 36 hours as a precaution against a possible attack.
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